Vos
Vos was massive. One in eight people in the world lived within 70 miles of the city center. The city continued to grow on a regular basis. From an aerial view, the city looked like a concrete cancer cell, a waterless white blot on the west side of the continent, urban tendrils slithering out in all directions. The city operated like a living organism, the beating heart of the world economy. At the simplest level, the city sent energy out and took resources in. More than 90% of the world’s annual energy output was generated in the gas mines in the mountains north of Vos. Vos’s explosive growth over the last century and very existence were due to the cheap, nearly unlimited sources of energy in the mountains to the north. There were simply no cheap or substantive sources of energy available anywhere else in the world – and when the world government took hold, they ensured no infrastructure was built in areas of the world with energy reserves of any kind to change this fact. Only in certain areas very remote from the capital was energy produced locally, where the cost of local production was cheaper than the price of importing reserves from the capital. The infrastructure to support Vos’s operations was equally herculean. There was the vast network of gas extraction centers in the mountains, and the refinery centers closer into the city. There were also massive industrial batteries to hold the processed power and the labyrinthian network of railways and electric systems supporting the movement of energy and goods in and out of the city. The vast metal and raw minerals supply in the mountains expedited Vos’s industrial development, amounting to 70% of the world’s metal and mineral production on an annual basis. Vos’s industrialization came to encompass the production of most of the world’s processed goods as well. Industrial production was vastly cheaper in the capital due to the cheap energy, accessible mineral assets and massive labor force. Factories dotted the urban landscape, producing everything from children’s toys to the complex, technologically advanced weapons the government demanded for keeping the peace. And so, Vos operated like a living cancer cell, a process in flow. Food, water and natural resources in, energy, metal and technology out. Over the last 70 years, Vos’s booming economy coupled with widespread economic collapse in the rest of the world drove massive migration into the city. The government managed to keep pace with transportation with the production of a massive system of railways to bring people into the places of work in the city center and north. They failed, however, to provide adequate housing, sanitation, hospitals or even the most basic safety requirements beyond this. The result was massive, autonomous slums sprawling into the southern and eastern regions. Crime in the slums was widespread, and the army and city police generally stayed in the wealthier northern areas and city center, which by comparison were some of the safest areas in the world. It was ironic that, less than 50 miles from the capital of the world government, were areas over which they truthfully had very little control. Parda had first settled down upon his return to the city in one of these slums, a slum named Vidigal along the eastern reaches of the city.